Guess I need to do the obligatory miscellaneous blog....

My apologies to the WiR site. It turns out that was wrong re: Alex DeWitt; she's the actual inspiration for the site. My confusion was based on reading the comic book in question (where Katma Tui died), and then not seeing DeWitt mentioned on the site beyond the clip of the comic. Again, sorry for any confusion created by my post.

It's Christmas, and time for presents. Please check out the sites attached to this blog (Lulu and SakuraCorp especially) and feel free to go on a wild spree. That said, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, and Fun Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year!

I'm also looking for an artist for Sex Percussions. If you're not interested in doing the 65-page script, would you be interested in doing a guest comic?

And since it's no surprise that I support the writer's strike, I guess I post something...so how about some fun stuff?

A World Without Writers

Voices of Uncertainty
The Office is Closed
Stop The Hollywood Writers Strike
Sandra Oh: How Greedy Can You Get?
Writers Strike: Unfair to Producers
Hollywood Writers Strike- Day 72
Videoblog of the Strike (one of the Colbert writers

Poor Colbert Show

[Thanks to Sam McManis, of the Sacramento Bee for pointing this out...well, some of it.]

--FR

Common Mistakes in Character Building

There are some basic problems when people build characters. They either give the characters too many advantages or disadvantages or forget to flesh them out. There are also characters that are forgotten or otherwise abused by writers. As such they need a little love; here are some ideas for making them better characters.



Mary Sue/Gary Stu's: Some characters have too much power on one hand and enough psychological issues to pay off a therapist's student loans on the other. Girls' comics are filled with these characters, because not only is empowerment considered a great thing (thus the sheer number of abilities), but so is sensitivity and admitting your problems (thus the sheer number of personality problems). Another way to look at it is that they are given so much, and so must have a number of things to make up for it. There was a reason that I suggested no more than four good things and no more than two bad things; it's a simple way to balance out your characters. You should always strive for balanced characters, and should avoid characters that have too much going for them in either side of the balance sheet. They are just too hard to write and rarely become fan favorites.



Caricatures: At the other end of the spectrum are the shallow characters, those that are more caricatures than characters. The problem is that these characters aren't intended to be serious characters, and so the writer doesn't treat them seriously. It needs to be remembered that all characters need to taken seriously, no matter how silly they are; in fact, the silliest characters come off as even sillier if they are played straight. Thus, you need to make sure that all of your characters are fully developed, and that characters that are caricatures show themselves to be fully developed in order to take your running gag go to the next level.



Disrespected Characters: Some people just shouldn't write certain types of characters. This is usually most obvious when it comes to military or religious types, or even authority figures in general, but it can apply to any type of character. The obvious example here is the character who is treated as a caricature; the FBI agent that is far too official, harasses the main character while spouting arcane laws or interpreting laws in order to nail the main characters, and is basically not someone who you want to invite to Christmas dinner. More than any other character, this kind has the highest possibility of taking your readers out of the book, and possibly ruining any scene that he is in. The only real advice I can give you here is that you need to be aware of those types of characters that you don't have any respect for, and try to avoid writing those kind of characters. If you do need to write those characters, then you need to make an effort to treat the character respectfully.



Mandatory Characters: Every genre seems to have those characters that are mandatory, and that everyone seems to make sure that they are in stories of that genres, such as the barbarian in fantasy stories or the cool alien in science fiction. Jut remember that there are reasons that they are “mandatory” characters and take advantage of them. The obvious solution is to don't worry about omitting the character type, and be happy about it. However, if you're using the character as part of a running gag, then see the notes regarding caricatures above.



Love Interests, Sidekicks, and Villains: Always make sure that these characters are well-developed. One of the problems is that these characters are part of the story, but combine elements of various character types as mentioned above: Sidekicks may be treated as puppies, love interests may simply be elevated trollops, and villains limited to the Snidely Whiplash version. Respect these characters, as they are the most important ones to your story, and the ones that pop up the most. Used correctly they can add a lot to your world, but if you abuse them then they will drag your story down with them.



Remember this advice, and your characters will love you for it and you will have some great stories.

Character Build For When Quick Characters

When it comes to your characters, you should have a basic build system. For those that role-play, you know what I'm referring to; it's how you create characters. For those that don't do much role-playing, it's a system that allows you build characters quickly making it ideal for writers who need to populate a world quickly with fully-rounded characters. There's a simple system for building characters that makes it simple to set up as many characters as you need in very short order. Oh, but you will need a pencil, a sharpener, and a lot of index cards.



The first step is to determine what role the character will be playing in the story. You can be as simplistic as hero, villain, sidekick, or bystander, for example, or work the character into the theme (“the character shows the hero that there is always hope”, for example). The more specific you can get the better, as the more specific you are at this stage, the simpler the other stages will be. It's important that you know what role the character will play; even if it amounts to a cameo, the character needs to do something or you're just wasting words, and every one of your words should be well-chosen.



Once you have established what the character's role is, you can then assign a power level. Even in stories where magic and superpowers aren't used, characters tend to have power levels defined in terms of the story; in a military story, for example, rank, experience, and access to weapons and vehicles would define power. In a high school setting, social status, skill sets, and grade level would be determined by power level (a senior with impressive hacking or athletic skills who is capable of asking anyone for favors would have a higher power level than a freshmen with no contacts,little status, and few skills, for example).



You should limit the number of god-like characters, however. If you have a lot of them running around, it quickly becomes a question of either why they don't take care of the problem, or why characters would want to know everything when they can't use that power. Tolkien had the right idea; the important action was in the background with Frodo, and the power characters had to deal with the major problems. Even Tom Bombadil was used to effect, even with his limitations of where he could go.



Even if the setting is exploring extreme powers, you need to keep in mind that the characters should not be the most powerful beings in the story. Even Superman and The Authority are not the most powerful beings in their respective comics; there are still entities that are more powerful than them. It's not a balance issue; it's more that, if they were the most powerful entities, there would be no challenges for them, and they wouldn't be as interesting. They would walk through any challenge and you would hard-pressed to come up with an interesting adversary for them, and without an interesting adversary your story would be boring before you even got out of the gate.



You should then determine the character's personality; combined with the power level and role, the personality will determine appearance, abilities, and other basic characteristics. You should define three personality traits, two good and one bad. That should give your character a balanced, three-dimensional personality. While you're at it, go ahead and give the character two to four advantages, things that he does that he does better than other characters, and that allows him to stand out. Also, define one or two negative qualities. Being an apprentice bears special noting, especially given the number of sidekicks and young heroes; an apprentice should be considered a negative attribute as the character has to (at least theoretically) obey his master.



And that's my quicky character generation process. All other features should be easy to define; the broad strokes have been painted in, and you should just need worry about details. Admittedly I prefer to use an actual table-top game, such as the Champions RPG, so I have a full range of stats, but that's me. But this should be more than enough to start. Hope this helps!

How Not to Put Women in Refrigerators

As a means of interesting things to avoid, let me point you to this site: Women in Refrigerators

[For those who don't like great sites, “Women in Refrigerators” refers to the detail that women characters seem to suffer more in comics than other kinds of characters (in fact, the term comes from John Stewart's girlfriend being killed and being stuffed into a refrigerator during his tenure as Green Lantern). For example, look at the women in Spidey's life: Gwen Stacy was killed by Green Goblin, Felicia Hardy aka Black Cat has lost her powers and had her powers mutate, Aunt May has died and almost married Doctor Octopus, Betty Leeds was the victim of abuse, and even Mary Jane was kidnapped more than her fair share of times. They also seem to be depowered, maimed, and killed more often as well.]

Although I would dispute the issue when it comes to the fate of heroines that are art of ensemble casts or have their own book, I really can't when it comes to the girlfriend situation. One of the essays on the site points out that the same happens to boyfriends as well; you can't kill off the main character, so someone else needs to suffer, and that pretty much leaves the love interest and the sidekick. And since the sidekick has to put up with so much abuse, anything bad happening to him just feels wrong. Worse, you're killing off the love interest because you want the visceral effect, and you just can't get that if you kill off someone who isn't important.

So, how do you deal with the problem? You can't keep introducing new lovers and friends just to kill them off, or do other nasty things to them; have you noticed that you can tell who is going to die on TV when some new love interest is introduced? If it happens too often, then your fans will start asking why your hero hasn't committed suicide or at least suffering from intense depression (“Every time I meet someone interesting, they seem to die horribly. I need a drink.”).

The solution is to make sure that you have a stable of interesting characters. You need to make all of your characters interesting, and not just those that will be getting a lot of screen time. All of your characters need to have interesting backgrounds, depth, and a little extra dialogue; they need to have just as much as detail as your main characters, even if you never explore that in the script istelf. It's not wasted effort; it gives you a much better handle on the situation when you write, and that's worth any effort you can give him.

If you do this, then you can spread the pain around; whoever you hit with the damage will affect the reader in the way you want them to be affect: Deep and painfully. Also, because readers associate with background characters more, especially if they have been well-written, you can get the same dramatic effect from one of their deaths as well. I imagine that if J. Jonah Jameson died, you can bet that there would be a lot of people not happy with the writers.

In short, if you want to be taken seriously, then you need to take your characters seriously. Do that, and you really have no limits to what you can do. Don't, and you're just writing the usual, boring pablum; do you really want to about baby food or a rich seven-course meal?

[And, yes, this applies to writers of kid lit just as much as it does to novel writers!!]

[EDIT: I've gotten a couple of comment referring to Kyle Rayner's girlfriend Alexandra "Alex" DeWitt, killed by Major Force in GL Vol. 3, Issue #54, (in 1999) was the dead girlfriend of a Green Lantern to inspire the site (and, in fact, it's a picture of that scene on the current front page). However, I was under the impression that the original Woman in a Refrigerator was John Stewart's girlfriend Katma Tui (who was killed in Action Comics Weekly #601 in 1988), killed by Star Sapphire). Given that a few of the articles predate DeWitt's death, I've sent off an e-mail for clarification...]